Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by singlePostAnon 660 days ago
It's possible to add a pretty simple 50Hz/60Hz switch to any SNES or SFC console (just as on Mega Drive / Genesis, Saturn, Jaguar, and others), see eg. https://gamesx.com/importmod/snes5060.htm

I don't know if the timings will be EXACTLY* the same as on an actual console from the "other" region but should be pretty close, close enough to not really notice a difference in gameplay and make all the games I know about from the "other" region work correctly, assuming you bypass the lockout chip as well and aren't trying to play a game which detects a disabled lockout chip like the SA-1 games.

Often these 50/60Hz switch mods either don't switch the colour encoding at all (you get PAL60 which actually works on many, even older, European TVs and monitors, or NTSC50) or breaks it completely, but use RGB interconnects and that won't be a problem at all. IIRC a PAL SNES modified this way outputs PAL60, but it might have been just totally broken composite / s-video as well (which will show up as monochrome on any display).

(on Dreamcast, PS2, and later model PS1s hardware from all regions can actually do both colour encodings as well.)

On NES you really need to swap a couple of chips and a crystal to convert a PAL console to NTSC or vice versa, some other older systems as well.

*) I know that at least on the 1st PlayStation, a PAL console switched via software to 60Hz doesn't have exactly the same timings as a real NTSC console, also vice versa, but the difference is so minor that at least I never even noticed, just read about it years later on the Internet, IIRC it was either the shmups.system11.org forum or some Mednafen developer comments on their website where I saw this

(apologies if this is already touched upon on your site, haven't read those pages fully yet...)